


The Clairvoyant

by Its_Raineing_Words



Series: Ghost Hunters [1]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Fluffy Ending, Ghost Hunters, Ghosts, M/M, Meet-Cute, Mild Hurt/Comfort, like barely any but still, phil is not happy at the start
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 22:36:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10626546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Its_Raineing_Words/pseuds/Its_Raineing_Words
Summary: Dan finds a finds a friend in an unexpected (and haunted) place.





	

Howell and Son are the foremost ghost hunting agency in the UK, mainly because there are probably less than ten but also because their agency was the oldest. In 1886 Joshua Howell, a popular medium, started to broaden his work contacting the dead relatives of his customers and started to talk to the ghosts in the houses. He quickly found that helping lost spirits cross over to the other side was a lot more enjoyable than holding the hands of sweaty gentlemen while they blubbered to their mothers and set up his own agency. 

The company flourished and Joshua’s son, Louis took over him after his death even though he was no psychic himself. In fact none of Howell and Son had been psychic until Dan had joined the team five years ago at eighteen. The edition of Dan had been just what they’d needed, even if he was skittish and often fled during the investigations at the beginning. 

This particular case was fairly normal by their standards, even if the activity levels reported by the intimidated owners had been a little bit higher than what they were used to.   
“I think this ghost is...tidying their house.” Imogen said once Dan had reviewed the notes he’d taken down from the email the owners had sent.  
Dan frowned, “What do you mean?”  
“This ghost is moving dirty dishes from the living room and into kitchen when the owners are out of the house. Apparently they thought that they had a particularly helpful burglar but they installed a high tech burglar alarm and CCTV and found nothing-that and the CCTV footage would cut out and during those cuts the dishes would move.” She explained.   
“That’s new,” Dan offered by way of reply, “Are we going to do the job?”  
“Of course!” Imogen enthused, “It’ll be an easy case, plus I’ll hopefully be able to get some awesome recordings or something...depends on how vocal this ‘helpful ghost’ is feeling.”   
“Yeah…” He said, giving her an odd look, “I’m fairly sure the ghost isn’t being helpful, I mean, when have you really ever heard of that before? Sure some spirits have delusions of thinking they’re still alive and sometimes they try to do things relating to the upkeep of house as a result but I’m not sure that’s really being helpful in the way you mean.”  
“You’re right, I suppose.” She admitted, “We’ll find out when we go to investigate, Dan. Then you’ll eat your words.”

The house itself was a bit of a surprise when the van pulled up the next day, it was a lovely cottage on the outskirts of a small village near Lancaster. The cottage had a lovely, well kept garden and was all in all very normal-looking. Of course plenty of places they went to looked nice and beautiful but this place felt nice too, the more Dan got accustomed to the atmosphere of the place the more he felt comforted by it. If he hadn’t seen video evidence of supernatural activity he would have been sure that there were no ghosts presence at all.

As Dan and Imogen stood at the door he looked over to her.  
“This place feels very quiet, so we’ll probably have to coax the ghost out, Imogen.” He warned.   
She just nodded and knocked at the door. A very short amount of time later the door opened by a short, plump woman who smiled and ushered them in, but not without giving their equipment an odd look. 

Once they had gotten everything set up in the living room: camera to record their interview with the owner of the house, Barbra Bailey, EMF reader to pick any spikes in the room and some tea supplied by Barbra they set about their work.  
“Right,” Dan began, “our colleagues will be here in another hour or so with the rest of the equipment so in the meantime let’s set about our interview.”   
“Of course.” Mrs Bailey replied, “What do you want to know?”  
“How long has this activity been going on?” Imogen asked.  
“As long as we’ve owned this house, really. So about three years.” She replied.  
“And you’ve only just sought help now?” Dan said, trying not to gawk.   
“Well, it’s never really been a problem. Our children haven’t been scared by it and there’s been no damage. It’s just that we want to move house and I think that this might make it more difficult to sell it.” Mrs Bailey said in between sips of her tea.   
“That’s understandable. I’m sure we can help you by helping this spirit to pass on.” Imogen said comfortingly.  
“Yes, yes. Well, I certainly hope so. After all I’m not sure I’d get a good price on a haunted house,” She joked weakly. 

Once they had gathered all the information off of the occupants of the house they politely sent them to a hotel for the night so as to leave them in peace to conduct their investigations. Getting everything set up was a chore like it always was and Dan found himself rushing around hooking up all the microphones and checking that everything was in order. Dan and Imogen sat in silence for a while as the rest of crew did the finishing touches to the house just in time for sundown. 

The way investigations usually went was that there was a team set up either in the van outside the house or in one of the rooms with less activity, depending on the size of the place. It wasn’t any different this time and Dan found himself in the dark cottage alone while the rest of the crew were set up in the van. No matter how long he’d been doing his job he never got completely used to having to wander around in a completely dark house, it made his imagination run wild. It was worse when what was in the building was worse than what his imagination could come up with, though. 

Dan sat down on the sofa in the living room where the majority of the activity took place and cleared his throat before speaking.  
“Hello, are you here?” There was a long silence only punctuated by the crackle of the spirit box, “This box here can pick up anything you say so if you can just speak into this it’ll let me hear it.”   
He waited again and after a little while there was a sound, something halfway between a snatch of voice and a squeal. The client usually wanted audio of the spirit so Dan made sure to at least try to get some before he got down to business. While that snatch of sound wasn’t particularly clear after years of doing this he was able to make out a sound and if he was about to guess what the spirit had said, which he was, he’d say he’d said ‘hello’ or something of the sort. There was a definite ‘h’ sound along with the higher pitch of a greeting. He thanked the spirit and radioed John who was manning the other walkie talkie.  
“I got a snatch of speech, I think it’s a greeting of some sort. I’m going to try and get some more audio later but for now I’m going to try and contact them myself.”   
John grunted, “Go ahead, though I want a good amount of audio, if you can. You know how difficult it can be to convince clients that we actually do anything without it.”  
“Will do. Alright, I’ll speak to you later.” With that the line crackled and faded. 

With that Dan set the walkie talkie down on the coffee table that shone with polish even in the low light and set about centreing himself for the upcoming communications. Getting himself in the right state to communicate with spirits took work, he could sense activity all the time but to be able to actually see or hear anything less powerful than the most boisterous of energetic displays took time. He hummed to himself as his mind emptied and his breathing slowed. He was a professional so it didn’t take him too long to centre himself and once he had he looked around the room, half expecting to see the spirit right away.   
“Hello? Could you come forward? I’ll be able to see you.” Dan said as sometimes the spirits expected him not to notice them so they didn’t bother being in the room.   
That seemed to be the case this time as he felt a rush of energy and soon he was face to face with a nervous-looking teen with black hair falling over a deathly pale forehead.   
While inwardly startled by the spirit’s sudden appearance Dan didn’t let it show as he smiled comfortingly at him, “Hello there. Are you the spirit that has been moving plates from this room into the kitchen?” There could be multiple ghosts in the house after all, though he doubted it.   
“Hello and yes I am,” The ghost’s voice sounded kind and the Lancastrian accent suited him. Dan took a moment to look at the boy’s clothes and found that he couldn’t easily place what time was from. He wore fairly loose fitting slacks, nothing like Dan’s skinny jeans, and a white button up, “Thought the place could use a tidy up, Aunt Emma would throw a fit if she could see it. Come to think of it she wouldn’t like a lot of things that have happened to this place.”  
“Oh, is that why you’re here, then?” Dan asked, trying to remember if any of the research they’d done on the house had pulled up anyone by the name of Emma.   
“What do you mean?” The boy frowned slightly and tilted his head in confusion like a puppy.   
“Is that your unfinished business? Keeping the house in check? Every spirit that stays on Earth has unfinished business.” He explained.   
“I don’t know. I have been wondering why I’m here, though. I hope this isn’t some kind of purgatory because I’ve been here a long time and I’m sure I didn’t sin enough for that.” The spirit mused, hovering a little above the ground before shaking himself out of his reverie and floating back down to the floor.   
“You’re not in purgatory or not as far as I know at least,” Dan chuckled.  
“Good,” He paused, looking sheepish, “What’s your name? I haven’t really been able to speak to anyone in a long while and I find that I’ve missed it far more than I thought I had.”  
“Not at all, anyone would miss company and having someone to speak and listen to,” He reassured, “And I’m Dan, um, Daniel Howell, I guess.”  
“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Daniel. I’m Philip Lester but do call me Phil,” Phil smiled and Dan saw his teeth glint in the low light even though he knew that was impossible as light didn’t reflect off of spirits, “I remember hearing something about you doing some sort of ‘ghost hunt’,” He quoted the words with his fingers, “how long will that take?”  
“Well that depends on you, I suppose. What do you want to do?”   
“It would help to know what the options were,” Phil laughed and Dan blushed in embarrassment.  
“That would help, yeah...so I can obviously try to help you move on or you could stay here since I refuse to force you out, though that wouldn’t be helpful to our client since they want to sell the house.” He said.  
“I don’t know...it’s not as though I like it here, this place is horrifically suffocating after being trapped all this time but I don’t want to move on either.”   
“Why not?” Dan asked.  
“I...well I never got to do anything interesting when I was alive and I want to. And besides, ‘moving on’ doesn’t seem that interesting and where would I be moving on to?”   
Dan hadn’t honestly thought about that, it felt very remiss of him but if he was honest, he’d been told about ghosts and unfinished business and how when they moved on they went to heaven when he was a child and just believed it, even long after he stopped believing in heaven or God. Why wouldn’t a spirit want to carry on doing things and seeing places after they’d died? Of course they would.   
“I have no idea, honestly. No one’s ever come back and told me.” He felt ridiculous for having said that and changed the subject quickly, “Where would you want to go?”  
Phil’s eyes glazed over as he thought, “When I was a child I wanted to join the army and go to India, see the colonies being created. Now though, I have no idea what’s going on in the world beyond what I overhear and see on the telly.”  
“You know what a telly is?” He didn’t mean to sound as incredulous as he did but he’d never had a genuine chat with a spirit before, they were usually far too angry or upset to speak at any length, that or they wanted to move on as quickly as possible so the conversation was never longer than a few sentences.   
“Well I assume that’s what it’s called since that’s what Barbara calls it.” Phil explained, shrugging, “I can understand what new words mean given the right context, Daniel.” Feeling chastised he was about to apologise when Phil started to chuckle loudly, “It’s been too long since I’ve been able to joke with anyone, I apologise. My point still stands, though.”  
“That makes sense. Oh shit! I just remembered, I need to get some audio samples from you. I managed to get a snatch of something earlier but we need more than that for Mrs Bailey to believe we’ve done a good job regardless of whether you’re still there or not.” He said, gesturing to his dictaphone.   
“Yes...I think I was so excited to see someone doing something interesting in this house that I got a bit carried away.” He said.   
“You’re going to have to get a bit more carried away, possibly say something about yourself-that reminds me! I need to do some research on you, see if I can find anything good.”   
“Ok, I would help you but I have no idea where you’d find anything nowadays,” He said, looking crestfallen before quickly perking up again. Dan was beginning to think that being so happy was just part of how Phil was, “Of course I can help you with names and dates, things like that.”  
“That’ll definitely be useful. Now what do you want to say into this dictaphone?” Dan said, holding the dictaphone up to Phil.   
Phil looked thoughtful for a moment before shrugging, “What does it matter. Hello, dictaphone, you look very strange indeed with those blinking lights and whatnot.”  
Dan had known Phil must have died a while ago but his archaic speech to the dictaphone hammered the fact home.  
“I think that’ll work, John will let me know if the audio is messed up for whatever reason.”  
“John? Is the big bloke who was setting up those little plastic thingamajigs?” Phil asked.  
“Yeah, that’s him. Nice bloke all in all, very result orientated though which can make it more difficult to do my job,” Dan sighed.   
“I did hear him called by that name a few times. Being dead does make you pay attention to the little things.” He said.   
“I imagine it would, yeah.” Just at that moment the walkie talkie crackled to live, “John?”  
“Yeah, the audio is fine. Should be enough for Barbra. You can do whatever you need to now, Dan.”   
“Thanks,” The walkie talkie clicked off, “Phil, we have a few hours but I think we’re going to have to figure out what to do with you since you don’t want to move on.”  
“Can you take me with you? I’ve tried leaving this place, Lord knows I have, but I can sense you’re powerful. Can’t you do something?” He asked desperately.  
“I...I can try. I mean, I’ve heard about certain hunters trapping ghosts, that should be able to let me take you with me,” Dan said, frowning in thought.   
“What exactly would that involve?” Dan could see that Phil’s form was shaking gently, like the ghostly equivalent of a nervous twitch.   
“Binding the ghost to something, it doesn’t have to be particularly big. When trapping an unwilling ghost people do tend to use a lot of mirrors to confuse the ghost into becoming trapped. I don’t have anything like that with me but if I was to take a guess...if you wanted to be bound to an object it wouldn’t really matter what it was,” he mused.   
“Do you know how to do this?” Phil sounded nervous which Dan couldn’t exactly blame him for.   
“I have a very good idea of what to do,” he rubbed the back of his neck as he spoke, “even if it goes wrong I don’t think it would hurt you which is good.”  
Phil looked like he was about to question what Dan had said but changed his mind and just nodded, “I’m ready whenever you are.”   
He fidgeted under the scrutiny of the ghost as he thought about what he could use. Something told him that using anything electrical would be very difficult, mostly because he would have trouble creating a bond between the spirit world and the electric device, so his phone was out of the question as well as his spirit box. That left him with very few options, thoughts of Horcruxes from when he had read the Harry Potter books as a child came to mind.  
“What about my bracelet? It’s fairly small and because it has sentimental value to me I think it would make the whole thing work better.” He offered, shrugging and he pulled his sleeve up to look at the braided brown cord bracelet.  
“I certainly won’t be putting up a fight, I want to get out of here more than anything.” Phil said.  
“You’re going to have to trust me, though. I can’t imagine it’ll be very pleasant…”   
He shrugged, “Nothing has been pleasant for me for a very long time, Dan. Anything to be rid of this place.” 

Dan took a moment to centre himself, he had winged a lot of things in his life; his GCSE’s, every job interview he’d ever done and most notably a talk about the paranormal but nothing he’d ever winged had actually directly affected anyone else. It terrified him but something inside him told him that he was perfectly capable of what he needed to do. With his eyes still closed he mentally reached out for Phil’s energy and grabbed it, letting it mingle before securing it to himself.  
“That tickles!” Phil giggled before falling silent again.   
Then Dan felt the ghostly energy of Phil’s incorporeal being filter with his own aura and collected it in his shoulders before channeling it down his arm and to his hand where he was clutching his bracelet. There was a slight resistance as he felt Phil’s nervousness at being corralled like that but it was the lightest whisper of opposition which he easily overpowered. 

When he opened his eyes Phil wasn’t there but when he looked down to his bracelet the cord was humming with power and Dan could just about make out Phil’s aura buzzing around the cord.   
“It worked!” Dan cried out excitedly, he almost expected Phil to reply but there was only silence which was punctuated by the crackling of the walkie-talkie.   
“Hello, John, what’s up?” Dan greeted, still looking at his bracelet in awe.   
“Nothing pressing, just wanted to let you know that you may want to hurry whatever it is you’re doing up. Sunrise won’t be for a while but it would be good to get everything packed away before Mrs Bailey comes back.” He explained and Dan could almost see him scratching his beard in thought as he spoke.   
“Don’t worry, I just finished now. We can start packing away as soon as you’re ready.”   
“Shit! You’re done already? Did you...you know, make contact?”   
Dan sniggered, “You make it sound like I’m trying to interact with alien life.”  
“You may as well be.” John retorted and Dan just snorted and let the conversation end. 

Dan debated whether to put the bracelet on for a moment before deciding against it and just held it in his hand as he picked up his spirit box and made his way out of the house. John was poking his head out of the back of the van and Dan could just about make out the slouched form of Imogen behind him.   
“Are you sure you’re done?” John asked, leaning precariously far out of the van.   
“Yeah, I think I’ve managed to sort everything out.”   
“What makes you say that?”  
“Nothing….just a hunch.”


End file.
